Brandi Turnbow
Current Event #3
Summary
This article discusses the Making Learning Visible research project through Harvard University, at a school in Italy, and twelve charter schools in Massechusetts. The MLV (Making Learning Visible) project focuses on group learning environments culture and documentation of learning in those environments. Three things from the projects recent research, and what this article is about are, the critical role of listening, the creation of a collective body of knowledge, equating learning and work. The critical role of listening addresses documentation of teachers listening to students, and students taking that listening pedegody and transferring it to group work. Making it possible to share ideas by actually “hearing” what another group member has to say, instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. The second is a collective body of knowledge. Learning groups extends beyond the individual and creates a collective body of knowledge. To accomplish this tasks must be; unable to completed alone, one where everyone can be invested, invites multiple perspectives, spark imagination, and a central focus on learning not work division. Finally the research looks at equating learning with work. Which focuses on students understanding of what it means to learn, and how they themselves learn.
Analysis
The article is well written, but poorly related to data. I had to explore the whole website to find out more about the raw data collected to determine the conclusions offered. The research includes teacher and student generated responses, observations, conclusions and feed back. The research project has been conducted by a highly respected author and cognitive developmentalist David Perkins. The research project is sponsored by Harvard University, and Project Zero (which was founded by Howard Garndner). The research has been performed over a twenty four year period, and several very large samples. The research has been a longtime evolving project, addressing many issues at once. So long story short, the research comes from a reputable source, the research has been performed on a large diverse sample, and the research has been consistently gathered for a long period of time. All these things give the research strength in supporting the ideas and conclusions that the article presents.
Strengths
The strengths of this article are; strong reliable research, current and on going work, and understandable well written conclusions.
Weaknesses
The weaknesses of this article are; raw data not connected to the actual article, the student and teacher responses while relevant, are not connected directly to the data, and I don’t feel the article was in depth enough about how teachers can make group learning visible.
Reflection
Although this article lacked in the data area, it really got me thinking how to improve my group work. It also started me thinking about work vs. learning, and how I can make sure my students are not only doing work…how can I measure the end product of work, and know learning has occurred??? I will use some of the techniques described in this article to improve group work in my classroom.
The Making Learning Visible Project
Most of us are in groups all the time. But are these
groups learning groups? When does a group become a learning
group? Can a group construct its own way of learning?
Can documenting children’s learning lead to new ways of
learning?
These are some of the questions addressed in the research
project, Making Learning Visible (MLV). MLV
draws attention to the power of the group as a learning environment
and documentation as a way to see how and what
children are learning. MLV is based on collaborative research
conducted by Project Zero researchers with teachers
from the Municipal Preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, and
preschool through high school teachers and teacher educators
in Massachusetts.
Current Project Staff
David Perkins, Daniel Wilson, Lia Davis, Deborah
Soule
Funding for this project has been provided by
Corporate Sponsorship
The overall goal of Making Learning Visible is to create
and sustain powerful cultures of learning in and across classrooms
and schools that nurture and make visible individual
and group learning. Often when people first encounter the
MLV work, they describe it as a project about documentation,
perhaps because it is the most tangible aspect of the
work—something people can see. Then, after spending more
time with the ideas, they say it’s a project about group learning.
But in the end, they say MLV is a project about culture,
values, and democracy. Learning in groups not only helps
us learn about content, it helps us learn about learning in a
way that fits with the kind of people we want to become and
the world we want to create. Learning in groups develops
critical human capacities for participating in a democratic
society—the ability to share our views and listen to those of
others, to entertain multiple perspectives, to seek connections,
to change our ideas, and to negotiate conflict.
MLV addresses three aspects of learning and teaching:
• What teachers and students can do to support the creation
of learning groups in the classroom.
• How observation and documentation can shape, extend,
and make visible children’s and adults’ individual
and group learning.
• How teachers, students, and others are creators as
well as transmitters of culture and knowledge.
Highlights from Our Recent Research
The following are some highlights of what we learned
in our 2003-05 MLV Seminar with 26 teachers and teacher
educators in Massachusetts.
The Critical Role of Listening
The ability to listen is an essential foundation for the exchange
and modification of ideas, yet many seminar teachers
talked about the poor skills of their students as listeners.
Lindy Johnson, a high school English teacher, said that while
her students could name many of the elements that make for
good discussion, they did not include “listening” on the list.
Lindy characterized her students’ views as more one of “I
don’t like you so I don’t need to listen to you.” Lindy’s social
studies colleague, Heather Moore Wood, described most of
the discussions in her class as, “This is my opinion, that’s
your opinion,” rather than a genuine exchange of ideas with
the possibility of modification. Moreover, Heather and Lindy
realized that many of their students had so little confidence
in their own ideas that it was difficult for them to engage
in a healthy exchange of ideas. Finding ways to help their
students listen to each other became a focus for Lindy’s and
Heather’s documentation.
The role of the teacher as one who listens also emerged
as significant. Students seemed to recognize the connection
between documentation and what Carlina Rinaldi refers to
as “the pedagogy of listening.” Students tend to respond
thoughtfully when their teachers demonstrate—often
through documentation—that they are listening. MLV’s
focus on group learning in conjunction with documentation
holds great promise for supporting deep thinking and
the practice of democracy in the classroom. Knowing that
someone is listening, students may take more care to formulate
their thoughts and to listen in return. Expressing and
explaining one’s own ideas, and listening and responding to
those of others, are critical to establishing a democratic culture
in and outside the classroom. Creating a space in which
people can offer, receive, and modify ideas becomes the very
thing that the teachers and students are working on.
The Creation of a Collective Body of Knowledge
The notion that learning in groups extends beyond the
learning of individuals to create a collective body of knowledge
was exciting and intriguing to seminar members, yet
its meaning was elusive. Most cooperative and other group
learning techniques are still seen primarily as ways to help
raise individual achievement. But in our view, the focus of
learning in learning groups is on advancing a collective
body of knowledge as well as individual learning. Rather
than simply completing a series of discrete tasks or activities,
members of learning groups in school feel like they are
contributing to a larger, more meaningful whole.
This concept prompted much discussion about the nature
of the task the group was working on and led teachers
to reflect on what it is the group comes together to do. Some
tasks are inspiring and compelling and provide reasons for a
group to come together, whereas others are far less successful.
A number of teachers identified many of their own tasks
as the less successful kind and began to grapple with what
is the nature of a promising task in this context. Some of the
ideas that emerged in our seminar include:
• Tasks which can’t be done alone
• Tasks in which everyone can be invested
• Tasks that invite multiple perspectives
• Tasks that spark the imagination
• Tasks in which there is a central focus on learning,
rather than an implied or actual emphasis on the group
completing work. (Although the completion of work can
lead to learning, many students and teachers perceive
collaborative tasks as opportunities to share labor, rather
than learn together, as we note below.)
Equating Learning and Work
A number of teachers noticed that their students seemed
to equate getting work done with learning. These teachers
also realized that while they considered learning a priority,
sometimes learning took a back seat to the work that was
supposed to generate it. In the absence of alignment of many
factors in the classroom, work gets equated with learning.
Consider this reflection from a ninth grade student in response
to a question about whether working or getting work
done was the same as learning:
Most times for me it is not about learning, but completing
the project. Many times I just want to complete
an assignment and do not care or even think
about how it may affect my learning. I guess part of
the reason is [due] to my education from my past.
It wasn’t until I hit 8th grade people started caring
about how I learned. We learned some fancy word
meaning understanding how you think. It was cool
to talk about, but hard to get across in an actual
project.
I am asking myself, “Do I learn better in groups or
by myself? What is the point of me knowing if I
am learning? Shouldn’t me working on something
mean I am learning? Who’s to say if I am learning
or not? How do others learn?” These questions are
now in my head after this experiment. I feel these
are good questions to better understand where people
are coming from.
For our seminar teachers, this discovery of the distinction
between doing school work and genuine learning in the
group was critical. It helped them to clarify their goals and to
focus on creating genuine learning groups, not just groups in
which students can get the work done.
Current and Future Work
We are currently building on our earlier research and
launching a new collaboration with the Massachusetts
Charter Public School Association and 12 Massachusetts
charter public and district public schools to share research
and innovative practices related to documenting and supporting
individual and group learning. We are also working
with the Wickliffe Progressive Community School in
Upper Arlington, Ohio, on a school-wide initiative to support
and make visible individual and group learning. The
Massachusetts collaboration involves monthly seminars with
24 teachers from the 12 schools. One goal of the seminar
is to create a dialogue between charter and district schools
around ideas and practices related to group learning and documentation.
Seminar members will share documentation of
student and teacher learning at a three-day institute in July,
2006, and on the Web. Each day of the institute will be organized
around a guiding theme: Schools as Places of Culture,
Values, and Democracy; Understanding, Documenting, and
Supporting Individual and Group Learning; and Toward
Making Learning Visible in Your School.
Documentation serves different purposes during different
stages of learning. These purposes might include collecting
documentation to aid one’s own reflection, to use in the
classroom with students and colleagues, and to share more
widely in and outside the school. Throughout this process,
it is easy to become so focused on learning to document
that one forgets about the underlying goal of documenting
to learn. Documentation makes learning visible when it focuses
on learning, not just something we did, and when it
promotes conversation and deepens understanding about
children’s thinking and effective teaching. We are currently
developing protocols to facilitate these conversations and
maintain a focus on learning at all stages of the process.